Reus: punish humans with the claws of an angry crab god

Hypothetical: If you were a giant, ancient crab imbued with godlike powers, how would you respond to your followers taking up arms against their very creator? If you responded with "cake," sorry. If you responded with "pound a town-shaped crater where they used to live," congratulations! You're ready for Reus , the indie god game coming up from developer Abbey Games that has you keeping an eye on the affairs of mortals while crafting a world to your whim.

"Humans grow irresponsible if they grow too fast," writes Abbey Games in a blog post . "With prosperity comes power. If the humans gain too much power too fast, they don't know what to do with it and become obsessed with it. Large civilizations might start wars to gain more land. Wealthy civilizations might become recklessly greedy. Advanced civilizations might trigger mishaps with their curiosity."

Keeping humanity from annihilating itself from existence are a pantheon of controllable giants who shift and sculpt the terrain into towering mountains and fertile valleys. Displaying benevolence to tiny mortals speeds up their growth and wealth, but too much prosperity can tip the scale, and turn a city into god-hating jerks.

Imagine a primitive king whose throne, thanks to your generosity, is actually a pile of coins. He's grown too cocky. "Look at all this damn money," he might say, proudly. "W e don't need no sky-scraping colossus of rock around here anymore!"

"I know," another citizen says, "Let's throw wooden sticks at it!" You get the idea: mismanagement leads to unruly villages, unruly villages make gods feel all wrathy, and wrathy gods solve their problems with giant boulders.

By the look of them, each giant controls a portion of nature. Abbey's trailer shows a rocky god, a wooden god, and a giant crab god, but others are surely planned, and the studio's blog shares more details on balancing their powers and the interactions between humanity and the humongous.